On Tue, 3 Feb 2004 20:10:41 -0500, "Backlash"
wrote:

How do you like DirecWay? I hear it's expensive.

RJ


About $470.00 for hardware, I got the install down from $200 to $100
by doing all the installation myself and letting the installer just
aim the antenna. Then I pay $59.99 a month for service.

The new DW-6000 modem/router is much better than the USB modem I had
with the one way system . Almost a no-brainer in comparison.

It may be a bit of an issue for people that know and manage their own
networking and want it to blend in with their network.

The DW-6000 has to be the DHCP server, that cannot be disabled. The
rest of the network has to be adapted to the DW-6000. But that is
easy enough to do. Worst case, you may wind up with a server with two
NICs in it, one to talk to the DW-6000 and the other to be on the
network that was already there. I swear, the only people that are
more anal than machinists about "my way or no way" are network
"administrators"

The real bugaboos are latency (25,000 miles up and back) and the Fair
Access Policy or FAP. The FAP is hard to explain but it boils down to
that if are doing a lot of downloading you get throttled back. And if
you continue to download, you'll stay throttled back forever.

Throughput? I do not do any excessive downloading and I get around
100 KB/sec down all the time and about 1/10th or 1/8th of that up all
the time.

I get some weather (rain and snow) fade and some occasional absolutely
weird and not further explained anomalies that are cured by retries.

DirecWay is much, much better than the 26.4-28.8 kbps I get on my old
copper lines that are not-DSL eligible and will probably never be
upgraded in my lifetime.

Cable will be 240-300 KB/sec download all the time and about 10
percent of that up. For just about exactly the same monthly charge.

I'll probably be off DirecWay within a week or two and would not have
started it had the cable company told me when the cable was going to
be available.

I can get a good part of the hardware investment back by selling the
dish and modem/router to someone.



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